How artificial intelligence in e-commerce frees up time to concentrate on the overall company picture
The adage “time is money” is as ancient as time itself. And it’s especially relevant in the quickly evolving world of e-commerce today, where companies are always trying to keep up with the swiftly shifting expectations and habits of their customers.
To succeed in e-commerce, you must outwit your rivals and provide your clients with an experience that they won’t find anywhere else. But if you’re rushing around trying to balance price optimization on an hourly basis, filling in descriptor boxes and tags, or setting up that next sequential email campaign, you won’t have much time to think, plan, and execute innovative ideas that could draw in more clients and build lifetime value.
Therefore, e-commerce professionals must also be astute in figuring out how to free up time so they can concentrate on the long term and business expansion.
And AI can help with that.
Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard products generated a lot of excitement surrounding the introduction of “Generative AI,” but as the dust settles and use cases become clear, it’s becoming clear that there are already useful AI applications for e-commerce.
In the coming years, generative AI has the ability to completely transform e-commerce. Before the field’s rapid advancements in 2023, Gartner’s 2022 AI Technology Maturity Curve projected that these tools would reach a production maturity level in two to five years. At a compound annual growth rate of 41%, the retail AI industry is expected to reach $57.8 billion by 2030.
However, there are ways to use current AI capabilities in the present to eliminate a lot of repetitive chores that take up brain space, distract from addressing problems, and prevent employee disillusionment from being caught on a hamster wheel. AI can perform some heavy lifting for your online business, much as industrial robots can move large pallets in a warehouse.
The effectiveness of customization
Customizing the buying experience is a primary focus for all merchants. When they purchase, customers place a great value on being identified and shown pertinent marketing information, customized offers, and suggestions. 72% of consumers “expect the businesses they buy from to recognize them as individuals and know their interests,” according to a McKinsey study.
Repeat business and client loyalty are more likely to result from demonstrating your understanding of each particular consumer and offering them a more customized experience. When creating customized experiences, historical transaction data, on-site habits, and the information that consumers voluntarily provide with their consent are all extremely useful. However, that’s a lot of data to gather, evaluate, and effectively employ. AI can quickly extract valuable data to create and assist in delivering the appropriate content at the appropriate moment.
One of the most important ways to foster loyalty is through post-purchase communication. AI may create and deliver a personalized “Thank you for your order!” checkout message to a consumer based on the goods they recently ordered. This eliminates a significant amount of physical effort.
Additionally, AI may be utilized to find and cultivate client groups for marketing initiatives. By looking through order data for shared traits or behaviors, an AI service may be instructed to look for and group a group of consumers. For instance, a business may like to send a customized newsletter with deals to regular customers. ‘Customers who have placed at least 10 orders in the last 10 months’ may be the selection criterion; AI can swiftly put this together, saving a ton of effort.
Assist in the production of content
Then there is the actual content of the website. Finding the appropriate picture for a campaign or coming up with brief adjectives that would have personal significance might occupy an employee for several hours.
Consumers are constantly curious about what’s “new,” whether it’s a new shirt color or fit or the performance characteristics of the newest TV model. It might be tedious labor to list and update product qualities depending on a product description, but AI features can automate this daily task. Such a feature can automatically generate a list of the product’s features based on the description, identifying which properties are previously stored so that staff members can quickly discover which properties are new and adjust promotions accordingly.
When it comes to increasing conversions and generating interest in a product line, images are crucial. ‘Tomato Girl Summer’ is a current TikTok fashion trend that may require an interesting blog post.
Feel sorry for the poor designer who has to go through a huge database and media library for photographs to use on their page. AI is capable of analyzing submitted photographs, determining their content, and assigning a keyword. In addition to being preserved as alt tags for improved search visibility, these keywords are also kept as metadata and are accessible through an admin search.
Along with enhancing performance for the largest shops, these and other AI technologies can help level the playing field for smaller and mid-size companies. There are less expensive methods to incorporate AI applications and capabilities into your e-commerce operations using software as a service packages, so you don’t need to spend heavily in a growing proprietary tech stack to access these features.
These technologies can free up staff members’ time so they can focus on more ambitious initiatives, including customization and providing the greatest possible shopping experience.